Gender & Nation
Theorizing Gender and Nation
Contributors: By: Nira Yuval-Davis
Book Title: Gender & Nation
Chapter Title: "Theorizing Gender and Nation"
Pub. Date: 1997
Access Date: December 1, 2020
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd
City: London
Print ISBN: 9780803986640
Online ISBN: 9781446222201
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446222201.n1
Print pages: 1-25
© 1997 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved.
This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online
version will vary from the pagination of the print book.
Theorizing Gender and Nation
Theorizing gender and nation
If the Woman does not want to be Mother, Nation is on its way to die.1
The mothers of the nation, the womenfolk as a whole, are the titans of our struggle.2
This book is about gender relations and the ways they affect and are affected by national projects and
processes. The main focus of the book is on the positions and positionings of women, but men and
masculinity are correspondingly central to the book's focus. As one of my sociology teachers at the Hebrew
University, Eric Cohen, used to say, Talking about women without talking about men, is like clapping hands
with one hand only’ Although I have come to reject much of what I was taught during my studies there all those
years ago, I still agree with the sentiment of this statement. ‘Womanhood’ is a relational category and has to
be understood and analysed as such. Moreover, one of the main arguments of the book is that constructions
of nationhood usually involve specific notions of both ‘manhood’ and ‘womanhood'.
The epistemological framework of the book is based on the recognition that knowledge is situated (Haraway,
1990), and that knowledge emanating from one standpoint cannot be ‘finished’ (Hill-Collins, 1990). Although
I have read — before and during the writing of this book — many books and articles written by scholars and
activists from different standpoints, I am aware, of course, that the perspective of the book is unavoidably
affected by my own specific positioning, and that a high percentage of the concrete examples with which I
have chosen to illustrate many of the theoretical points are based on events which took place in the societies
in which I have lived (mainly Israel and Britain) or in those of my close colleagues and friends (mentioned in
the preface). I do believe, however, that ‘unfinished’ is not the same as ‘invalid', and this has given me the
courage to actually write this book.
Most of the hegemonic theorizations about nations and nationalism (for example, Gellner, 1983; Hobsbawm,
1990; Kedourie, 1993; Smith, 1986; 1995), even including, sometimes, those written by women (for example,
Greenfeld, 1992), have ignored gender relations as irrelevant. This is most remarkable because a major
school of nationalism scholars, the ‘primordialists’ (Geertz, 1963; Shils, 1957; van den Berghe, 1979), have
seen in nations a natural and universal phenomenon which is an ‘automatic’ extension of kinship relations.
And yet, when discussing issues of national ‘production’ or ‘reproduction', the literature on nationalism does
not usually relate to women. Instead, it relates to state bureaucrats or intellectuals. Materialist analyses, such
as those by Amin (1978) and Zubaida (1989), have given primary importance to state bureaucracy and other
state apparatuses in establishing and reproducing national (as well as ethnic) ideologies and boundaries.
Although national and ethnic divisions also operate within the civil society, it is the differential access of
different collectivities to the state which dictates the nature of the hegemonic national ethos in the society.
Other theorists of nationalism and the sociology of knowledge, such as Gellner (1983) and Smith (1986),
have stressed the particular importance intellectuals have had in the creation and reproduction of nationalist
ideologies, especially those of oppressed collectivities. Being excluded from the hegemonic intelligentsia and
from open access to the state apparatus, these intellectuals ‘rediscover’ ‘collective memories', transform
popular oral traditions and languages into written ones, and portray a ‘national golden age’ in the distant
mythical or historical past, whose reconstitution becomes the basis for nationalist aspirations.
However, as this book elaborates, it is women — and not (just?) the bureaucracy and the intelligentsia —
who reproduce nations, biologically, culturally and symbolically. Why, then, are women usually ‘hidden’ in the
various the-orizations of the nationalist phenomena?
Pateman (1988) and Grant (1991) offer explanations which might be relevant here. Carole Pateman studied
the classical theories of ‘the social contract’ which are widely influential and have laid the foundation for
common sense understanding of western social and political order. These theories divide the sphere of civil
society into the public and private domains. Women (and the family) are located in the private domain, which
SAGE
© Nira Yuval-Davis 1997
SAGE Books
Page 2 of 18
SAGE Books - Theorizing Gender and Nation
is not seen as politically relevant. Pateman and other feminists have challenged the validity of this model and
the public/private divide even within its own assumptions, and Pateman claims that
the public realm cannot be fully understood in the absence of the private sphere, and, similarly, the meaning
of the original contract is misinterpreted without both. mutually dependent halves of the story. Civil freedom
depends on patriarchal right. (1988: 4)
As nationalism and nations have usually been discussed as part of the public political sphere, the exclusion
of women from that arena has affected their exclusion from that discourse as well.
Following Pateman, Rebecca Grant (1991) has an interesting explanation of why women were located outside
the relevant political domain. She claims that the foundation theories of both Hobbes and Rousseau portray
the transition from the imagined state of nature into orderly society exclusively in terms of what they both
assume to be natural male characteristics — the aggressive nature of men (in Hobbes) and the capacity for
reason in men (in Rousseau). Women are not part of this process and are therefore excluded from the social
and remain close to ‘nature'. Later theories followed these assumptions as given.
Some notable exceptions to the gender-blind theorizations of nationalism have been Balibar (1990a),
Chatterjee (1990) and Mosse (1985). Their insights were influenced and nurtured by a small but growing
group of feminist scholars who have been working in this area (for example, Enloe, 1989; Jayawardena, 1986;
Kandiyoti, 1991a; Parker et al., 1992; Pateman, 1988; Yuval-Davis, 1980; 1993; Yuval-Davis and Anthias,
1989). Nevertheless I think it is indicative that in the Oxford University Press reader Nationalism (edited by
John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith, 1994), the editors placed the only extract in the book which relates to
nationalism and gender relations in the last section, ‘Beyond Nationalism'. They introduced that extract (which
was taken from the introduction to the book Woman—Nation—State: Yuval-Davis and Anthias, 1989) in the
following words:
The entry of women into the national arena, as cultural and biological reproducers of the nation and as
transmitters of its values, has also redefined the content and boundaries of ethnicity and the nation. (1994:
287)
But, of course, women did not just ‘enter’ the national arena: they were always there, and central to its
constructions and reproductions! However, it is true that including women explicitly in the analytical discourse
around nations and nationalisms is only a very recent and partial endeavour.
The aim of this book is to promote this analytical project of a gendered understanding of nations and
nationalisms, by examining systematically the crucial contribution of gender relations into several major
dimensions of nationalist projects: national reproduction, national culture and national citizenship, as well as
national conflicts and wars.
Nationalist projects are sharply differentiated in the book from ‘nation-states', and it is emphasized that
membership of ‘nations’ can be sub-, super-and cross-states, as the boundaries of nations virtually never
coincide with those of the so-called ‘nation-states'. As becomes clear when reading the book, my analysis
is deconstructionist. At the same time, however, I reject the extreme postmodernist construction of
contemporary citizens as disembedded ‘free floating signifiers’ (Wexler, 1990). On the contrary, I highlight the
crucial importance of social and economic power relations and the cross-cutting social divisions in which any
concrete historical social categorization is enmeshed. These social divisions have organizational, experiential
and representational forms, which can have implications for the ways they are linked to other social relations
and actions (Anthias, 1991; Brah, 1992). They are not reducible to each other and have different ontological
bases (Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1983; 1992).
Nor do I accept unproblematically that we are all indeed in the ‘postmodern era'. Postmodernism includes
the uncritical assumption that we have all gone through the ‘modern’ era. In spite of the acceleration of the
processes of globalization, this is a very westocentric3 assumption (see more discussion of this in Chapter
3). Moreover, as Rattansi admits — while at the same time promoting the postmodern frame’ (1994: 16–17)
— various features which have been promoted by him and others as characteristic of the postmodern era
SAGE
© Nira Yuval-Davis 1997
SAGE Books
Page 3 of 18
SAGE Books - Theorizing Gender and Nation
have been features of other forms of society. His insistence on the need ‘to decentre and de-essentialize
both “subjects” and “the social”', to analyse temporality and spatiality as ‘constitutive features of the social, of
subjectivity and of processes of identification’ and — what would be a cornerstone of any feminist analysis
of any society at any time — to seek ‘an engagement with questions of sexuality and sexual difference', are
all part of, as I and many others would argue, what good sociological analysis should always be. Moreover,
at a time when religious fundamentalist movements are growing in all religions, in the North as well as in
the South, to describe contemporary society as one in which the grand narratives have ended is absurd. On
the other hand, even the most hegemonic naturalized grand narratives in historical societies have never had
homogeneous unified control over the differentially positioned members of those societies.
Given these observations, the project of the book is to introduce a framework for discussing and analysing
the different ways in which the discourse on gender and that on nation tend to intersect and to be constructed
by each other. Before embarking on this, however, there is a need to look at each discourse separately;
this will be done in the next two sections of this chapter. The focus of the discussion on ‘gender’ is on the
theoretical debates around the category of ‘woman’ as well as on the relationship between the notions of
‘sex’ and ‘gender'. Understanding these debates is crucial to any attempt to analyse the ways the relations
between women and men affect and are affected by various nationalist projects and processes, as well as the
ways notions of femininity and masculinity are constructed within nationalist discourses.
The notion of ‘the nation’ has to be analysed and related to nationalist ideologies and movements on the one
hand and the institutions of the state on the other. Nations are situated in specific historical moments and are
constructed by shifting nationalist discourses promoted by different groupings competing for hegemony. Their
gendered character should be understood only within such a contextualization.
Following these two sections, the last section of this chapter outlines the main dimensions of the intersections
between gender and nation which are examined in the following chapters of the book, moving from the
more ‘naturalized’ roles of women as biological reproducers of the nation, through their roles in the cultural
constructions of nations, to the ways civil constructions of nationhood, via rights and duties of citizenship, are
gendered. The penultimate chapter looks at the gendered nature of militaries and wars. The book concludes
with an examination of the complex relationship between feminism and nationalism and points towards
transversal politics as a model of feminist politics, which takes account of national as well as other forms of
difference among women, without falling into the trap of identity politics.
Analysing Women and Gender Relations
In spite of their great quantity and variety, one may crudely reduce the preoccupations of feminist literature
into three major questions. The first question was an attempt to analyse the causes of a common concern
of feminists: why/how are women oppressed? There has been a search for the organizing principles which
determine the power differences between men and women. Theories concerning ‘patriarchy’ (Eisenstein,
1979; Walby, 1990), or — as others prefer to call it — the sex/gender system (Rubin, 1975) or ‘gender
regimes’ (Connell, 1987), have been at the centre of feminist theory since its inception. Dichotomous
constructions of social spheres such as the public/private domains or nature/civilization have been central to
these analyses.
The second question relates to the ontological basis of the differences between men and women: are these
differences determined biologically, socially, or by a combination of the two? The discussion about this issue
is generally known as ‘the sex and gender debate’ (Assiter, 1996; Butler, 1990; Delphy, 1993; Hood-Williams,
1996; Oakley, 1985). Enquiries about the basis and the boundaries of the categories ‘woman’ and ‘man’
became more problematic with the rise of poststructuralist and postmodernist frameworks of analysis (Barrett
and Phillips, 1992).
The third question arose to a large extent as a reaction to some of the more simplistic — as well as
ethnocentric and westocentric — perspectives of early feminist literature. It concerns the differences among
women and among men and their effects upon generalized notions of gender relations. This question was
first pursued by mostly black and ethnic minority women (hooks, 1981) and then became incorporated into
feminist deconstructive postmodernist analyses (Barrett, 1987).
SAGE
© Nira Yuval-Davis 1997
SAGE Books
Page 4 of 18
SAGE Books - Theorizing Gender and Nation
Given the limitations of space and scope of this chapter, I cannot even attempt to give a systematic review of
all the debates on these three questions. However, any discussion on the issues raised in this book implies
and is informed by certain positions on these questions which thus need to be referred to here, even briefly.
Much of the explanation of women's oppression has been related to their location in a different social sphere
from that of men. Two such binary divides have been the public/private and the natural/civilized domains.
Much of the feminist literature, while pointing out and objecting to the fact that women have been ‘hidden from
history’ (Rowbotham, 1973), accepts the naturalized locations of men in the public sphere and women in the
private sphere.
In the chapter on citizenship (Chapter 4), some of the problems of the dichotomy of the private/public domains
and the ways these relate to the positioning of women as citizens will be discussed. It will be argued that this
division is fictional to a great extent as well as both gender and ethnic specific, and that often this division
has been used to exclude women from freedom and rights (Phillips, 1993: 63). Moreover, there have been
claims (Chatterjee, 1990) that the line between the public and the private is a completely inadequate tool
for analysing constructions of civil societies in post-colonial nations and that a non-westocentric analysis of
gender relations cannot assume the boundary between the public and the private as a given.
The private/public dichotomy, however, is only one of the dichotomies in which women have been positioned
at an opposite pole to that of men in the social sciences literature, including the feminist one. Another is that
of the nature/civilization divide. The identification of women with ‘nature’ has been seen not only as the cause
for their exclusion from the ‘civilized’ public political domain (Grant, 1991), but also as the explanation of the
fact that in all cultures women are less valued socially than men. Simone de Beauvoir argued that
It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal: that is why superiority has been
accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills, (quoted in Harding, 1986: 148)
Sherry Ortner (1974) has argued more generally that women tend to be identified with ‘nature’ while men
tend to be identified with ‘culture'. This is so because in bearing children women create new ‘things’ naturally,
while men are free/forced to create culturally. Women are also, as a result, more confined to the domestic
sphere and rear children who are ‘pre-social’ beings. Since human beings everywhere rank their own cultural
products above the realm of the physical world, as every culture is aimed at controlling and/or transcending
nature, women end up with an inferior symbolic position. Henrietta Moore (1988) adds, after Goodale (1980),
the concept of pollution as reinforcing women's symbolic devaluation and their connection to ‘nature', as
women are often constructed as ‘polluting’ when they are bleeding during menstruation or after child-birth.
However, she also points out some of the problems that such generalized notions about women's position can
raise. Such generalizations homogenize and discard the diversity of the different societies. They also assume
specific western cultural values of ‘nature’ as inferior to ‘culture’ to be universal and shared by all societies.
Last but not least, they assume that there is no difference among different members of the society, including
between men and women, as to how they value themselves and the other gender. In this way, notions of
social conflict, domination, resistance and, most importantly, of social change seem to be defined away.
Moreover, the search for a universal, ‘original’ reason for the subordination of women can detract attention
from historically specific ways in which gender relations are constructed in different societies and the ways
they are reproduced.
This critique of generalized notions of women's position holds also in relation to the notion of ‘patriarchy’ which
has been widely used by feminist theorists to describe the autonomous system of women's subordination in
society.
In the 1970s and 1980s feminist politics were neatly divided into separate schools of liberal, socialist, radical
and sometimes dual-system feminisms (Walby, 1990). The difference among these schools of thought was
primarily focused on the question of what they considered to be ‘the’ cause of women's oppression — whether
it was the law, capitalism or just men holding on to their privileges. There was also a lot of discussion about
the ‘unhappy marriage’ between Marxism and feminism (Hartman, 1981) and the ways one should theorize
patriarchal oppression in relation to class exploitation.
SAGE
© Nira Yuval-Davis 1997
SAGE Books
Page 5 of 18
SAGE Books - Theorizing Gender and Nation
The notion of ‘patriarchy’ in itself is highly problematic. Although it was often acknowledged that the rule of the
pater, the father, has been traditionally applied to younger men, not only to women, this did not usually play
a significant theoretical role in these generalized feminist usages of the term. This remained so even when
these usages were developed in more sophisticated theoretical models, such as in Sylvia Walby's (1990)
work (see also the special issue of Sociology, 1989), which differentiated between different forms of patriarchy
operating in the different social domains of employment, household production, culture, sexuality, violence
and the state.
Exceptions to this rule of generalized use can be found when patriarchy is consigned to a specific historical
period or geographical region. For example, in the works of Carole Pateman (1988) patriarchy is specific to
the premodern historical period. In the modern liberal state, according to her, the system is transformed from
patriarchy into fraternity. While in patriarchy the father (or the king as a father figure) ruled over both other
men and the women, in a fraternity the men get the right to rule over their women in the private domestic
sphere, but agree on a contract of a social order of equality among themselves within the public, political
sphere.
Val Moghadam (1994), on the other hand, follows the demographer John Caldwel and locates patriarchy in a
specific geographical zone, ‘the patriarchal belt', which stretches from Northern Africa across the Middle East
to the northern plains of the Indian subcontinent and parts of rural China. In this ‘belt’ of ‘classical patriarchy’
(Kandiyoti, 1988) the patriarchal extended family is the central social unit, in which the senior man rules
everyone else and family honour is closely linked to women's controlled ‘virtue'.
Although limiting patriarchy to specific social institutions, historical periods or geographical regions does go
somewhat in the direction of differentiating between diverse forms of social relations in different societies, it is
still a much too crude analytical instrument. It does not allow, for instance, for the fact that in most societies
some women have power at least over some men as well as over other women. Nor does it take into account
the fact that in concrete situations women's oppression is intermeshed in and articulated by other forms of
social oppression and social divisions.
This is the reason why elsewhere Floya Anthias and I have rejected the notion of patriarchy as a distinct
social system which is autonomous of other types of social systems such as capitalism and racism (Anthias
and Yuval-Davis, 1992: 106–9). Rather, we argued that women's oppression is endemic and integral to social
relations with regard to the distribution of power and material resources in the society. Gender, ethnicity
and class, although with different ontological bases and separate discourses, are intermeshed in each other
and articulated by each other in concrete social relations. They cannot be seen as additive and no one of
them can be prioritized abstractly. As Avtar Brah (1992: 144) has suggested, it is imperative that we do
not compartmentalize oppressions. In the theorizations of patriarchy — even the more sophisticated among
them (Ramazanoglu, 1989; Walby, 1990) — gender relations end up, at least implicitly, reduced and isolated
into necessary effects of biological sexual difference, which is obviously not the case. Contrary to what the
notion of patriarchy suggests, women are not usually just passive recipients and non-participants in the
determination of gender relations. Probably most importantly, not all women are oppressed and/or subjugated
in the same way or to the same extent, even within the same society at any specific moment.
This is not to suggest, however, that there are no hegemonic social discourses and practices in different
societies and in different locations within these societies which relate to the organization of sexual difference
and biological reproduction and establish forms of representation around these. Gayle Rubin (1975) called
these ‘the sex/gender systems'. R.W. Connell (1987), writing about twelve years later, has dropped the
naturalized biological ‘sex’ from his similar notion of ‘gender regimes'. Given the state of the contemporary
sex/gender debate, some argue that there might be a need to say ‘goodbye’ to them both (Hood-Williams,
1996) and to just concentrate on the notion of difference.
The question of the fixity of difference between women and men has been central to the feminist debate on
the ontological basis of that difference. From its inception, feminist politics has depended on the differentiation
between sex and gender. Claims that sexual divisions of labour, power and dispositions are not biological
('sex') but are socially constructed ('gender') have enabled feminists of various schools to argue that women's
social position can/should be transformed towards sexual equality. It is ‘a central explanatory and organizing
SAGE
© Nira Yuval-Davis 1997
SAGE Books
Page 6 of 18
SAGE Books - Theorizing Gender and Nation
category of their accounts of the social and familial and/or discursive construction of subjectivity’ (Gatens.
1991: 139) and is defended against the ‘danger of biological reductionism.
Christine Delphy (1993) has outlined the development of the debate about sex and gender as stretching
through the work of Margaret Mead, the Parsonian theories of sex roles, and finally the ground breaking work
of Ann Oakley's Sex, Gender and Society (1985). There is a progressive denaturalization of the divisions of
labour and psychological differences between men and women and a stress on cultural variation. According to
Delphy, however, none of these works, nor later feminist work, has questioned the assumption that gender is
based on a natural, sexual dichotomy. Judith Butler adds that when ‘gender’ is understood to be constructed
by ‘culture’ in the same way that ‘sex’ is constructed by ‘nature', then ‘not biology but culture becomes
destiny'(1990: 8).
This last point is of crucial importance and will be discussed in more detail in the chapter on culture (Chapter
3). However, of most relevance here is the fact that in spite of the great theoretical differences between
them, both Delphy and Butler point out that ‘gender precedes sex’ and that the cultural construction of the
social division of labour (Delphy) and of meaning (Butler) is the very means by which sexual differences are
constructed (and used) as natural and pre-social. So-called ‘objective’ ‘scientific’ tests have looked for the
presence or absence of chromosome Y to determine if a specific person is male or female, or, more recently,
in view of empirical ambiguity in some people, for a specific gene — such as the SRY, isolated in 1991 by
Goodfellow and his team. However, as Hood-Williams points out, this scientific project is tautological and has
a circular logic: the scientists ‘must already know what it is to be a man [socially], before they can confirm it
genetically’ (1996: 11). As Foucault (1980a) and Laqueur (1990) have pointed out, the mere need to construct
every human being as either male or female is historically — and therefore culturally — specific.
As Floya Anthias and I have argued (Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1983: 66), there are no necessary ‘natural’
social effects of sexual differences or biological reproduction, and thus they are not an equivalent material
basis for gender as production is for class. In analyses which attempted to discover a feminist materialism in
the social relations of reproduction we saw a super-imposition of a materialist project onto a different object,
inappropriately reproducing its terms of reference.
Gender should be understood not as a ‘real’ social difference between men and women, but as a mode
of discourse which relates to groups of subjects whose social roles are defined by their sexual/biological
difference as opposed to their economic positions or their membership in ethnic and racial collectivities.
Sexual differences should also be understood as a mode of discourse, one in which groups of social subjects
are defined as having different sexual/biological constitutions. In other words, both ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ can be
analysed as modes of discourse, but with different agendas.
The insistence on the discursive construction of meaning and the insistence on the non-natural nonessentialist
nature of both ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ have brought about a blurring of the boundaries between these
two constructions. Anyone who has been involved in feminist politics in non-English-speaking countries would
know, however, that one of the first and most urgent tasks of feminists there is to ‘invent’ a word in the local
language for ‘gender'. Unless there is a separation between the discourse of ‘sex’ and that of ‘gender', biology
would be constructed as destiny in the moral and political discourse of that society.
However, the objection to the blurring of the boundaries can be theoretical as well as political. Gatens points
out that a non-essentialist theoretical approach to sex and gender might involve
the unreasoned, unargued assumption that both the body and psyche are a postnatally passive tabula rasa.
That is, for theorists of gender, the mind of either sex is a neutral, passive entity, a blank state on which is
inscribed various social ‘lessons'. The body, on their account, is the passive mediator of these inscriptions.
(1991 140)
From here to ‘political correctness’ the path can be short and direct. If only an appropriate ‘Skinner box’
could be constructed to supply the right social environmental conditions in socializing the young and in ‘reeducating’
the old, all men and women could become equal — because they could all become, in principle,
the same.
SAGE
© Nira Yuval-Davis 1997
SAGE Books
Page 7 of 18
SAGE Books - Theorizing Gender and Nation
Gatens’ critique of this line of thinking is that it is based on a simplistic dichotomy of social theory into either
environmental or essentialist, and points out that at least the body is never passive. It is always a sexed body,
and therefore the same behaviour would have quite a different personal and social significance according to
whether it is carried out by a man or by a woman. In other words, the self is always situated.
Gatens’ insistence on the last point, following Donna Haraway's (1990) ‘situated knowledge’ and others, is
of utmost importance in analysing gender relations. However, the crucial importance of the insistence that
‘the self is always situated’ concerns the analysis not only of gender relations but of all social relations.
The situation of the body is not constructed only around sex differences (biological or discursive), nor is the
situation of the self affected only — or even always primarily — by the body. For Gatens, and other feminist
theorists like her, the sexual difference is crucial because they observe society via the gaze of middle class
westocentric psychoanalytic theory, especially that of Lacan (1982). However, macro social divisions of class,
ethnicity, ‘race’ and nation, as well as more subjective body-related differences of particular physical ‘type',
age and ability, are crucial in this process. In the same way that the boy or the girl looking at the mirror
would not know that they are male or female unless they have had access to those who are different from
them, subjective identities are always situated in relation to others according to all these dimensions, not only
the sexual. Otherness, in the concrete social world of the children, whether micro or macro, is very rarely
dichotomous and/or confined to sex alone.
The category ‘woman’ can be perceived as a unified category only if all these other differences are
suppressed, as was the situation in feminist white middle class ‘consciousness-raising groups’ in the 1970s
which aimed at their participants’ ‘discovering’ that the condition of all women is essentially the same (YuvalDavis,
1984).
If women are different from each other, the question that has been asked by many postmodernist feminists
has been to what extent there is any meaning to the term ‘women’ at all. Denise Riley sees ‘women’ as a
fluctuating identity and has argued that the category ‘“women” is historically and discursively constructed,
always in relation to other categories which themselves change’ (1987: 35). Elizabeth Weed argues, however,
that
the lack of a reliable positive identity docs not mean an endless proliferation of differences. It means, rather,
that the very categories of difference are displaced and denaturalized through the articulation of those
categories with the structures of domination in which they were historically produced. (1989: xix)
These historical structures of domination, therefore, determine which differences are considered socially and
politically relevant and which are not. However, as Elizabeth Spelman has argued, the similarities between
women exist within the context of the differences between them, and ‘there is ongoing debate about what
effect such differences have on those similarities … not all participants in that debate get equal air time or are
invested with equal authority'(1988: 159).
The concern should not be, therefore, with differences among women per se, as it is not just with what
is common to women in different social positionings. The concern is how to construct feminist political
mobilization which would take on board all of the above. Some attempt to tackle this issue will be made in the
last chapter of the book (Chapter 6).
One of the most important differences among women is their membership in ethnic and national collectivities,
which is the subject matter of this book. Like other differences among women, their membership in the
different collectivities should be understood within structures of domination and as articulated by other social
relations. These can affect not only the status and power of some women versus others, within and between
the collectivities they belong to, but also the extent to which their membership in the collectivity constitutes a
‘forced identity’ (to use Amrita Chhachhi's 1991 terminology) or can become little more than a postmodernist
‘free floating signifier’ of identity (Wexler, 1990). Relations between nations and states in specific historical
circumstances play a central role in these constructions.
SAGE
© Nira Yuval-Davis 1997
SAGE Books
Page 8 of 18
SAGE Books - Theorizing Gender and Nation
Theorizing Nations and States
The concept of the ‘nation-state’ assumes a complete correspondence between the boundaries of the nation
and the boundaries of those who live in a specific state. This, of course, is virtually everywhere a fiction. There
are always people living in particular societies and states who are not considered to be (and often do not
consider themselves to be) members of the hegemonic nation, there are members of national collectivities
who live in other countries, and there are nations which never had a state (like the Palestinians) or which
are divided across several states (like the Kurds). However, this fiction has been at the basis of nationalist
ideologies. Gellner has actually defined nationalism as a
theory of political legitimacy which requires that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones, and in
particular, that ethnic boundaries within a given state … should not separate the power holders from the rest
… and therefore state and culture must now be linked (1983: 1, 36).
The effect of this fiction is to naturalize the hegemony of one collectivity and its access to the ideological
apparatuses of both state and civil society. This naturalization is at the roots of the inherent connection that
exists between nationalism and racism. It constructs minorities into assumed deviants from the ‘normal', and
excludes them from important power resources. It can also lead the way to an eventual ‘ethnic cleansing'.
Deconstructing this is crucial to tackling racism on the one hand and to understanding the state itself on the
other hand.
The discussion in this section of the introductory chapter turns first to the notion of modern states and
to debates concerning their specificity and heterogeneity as well as to the need to theorize states as an
analytical sphere separate from society. The chapter argues that it is necessary to differentiate analytically
between the state, the civil society and the family, treating them as three separate if interrelated social and
political spheres. It then turns to define the specificity of national projects and how these relate to the state.
This section of the chapter ends with a brief discussion of different dimensions of nationalist projects, those
relating to the mythical notions of common origin (Volknation), those relating to the myth of common culture
(Kulturnation) and those relating to nations as based on the myth of equal citizenship in states (Staatnation).
State and Society
Theorizing the state as a sphere separate from both ‘the nation’ and ‘the civil society’ is vital for any adequate
analysis of the relationships between gender relations and national projects, in which the state often plays
crucial roles.
Stuart Hall defines the ‘modern state’ as one which includes the following features:
power is shared; rights to participate in government are legally or constitutionally defined; representation is
wide, state power is fully secular and boundaries of national sovereignty are clearly defined. (1984: 9–10)
This definition, of course, is highly idealistic and inaccurate even in relation to the European context in which
he describes it. Hall looks at the variants of later European states of both liberal and collective tendencies (of
both the Bolshevist and fascist types) as well as at the welfare state. However, he does not take account of
the imperial state which has become part of most modern European states, and which positioned different
civil societies and nations in very different relations to the same state. One cannot understand, for instance,
the ways in which contemporary nationalisms interrelate with racism without looking at this, both in Europe
itself and in Third World post-colonial states.
The state has been analysed in very different ways from different theoretical perspectives (for some overviews
see, for example, Held, 1984; Peterson, 1992; Yuval-Davis and Anthias, 1989). It is interesting, for instance,
that in international relations, states are usually considered as single, individual identities. On the other hand
when dealing with relations between state and society, states become much more heterogeneous if not allencompassing
creatures. The classical theories of ‘the social contract’ which are widely influential and have
laid the foundation for a common sense understanding of state and society have been examined by Carole
SAGE
© Nira Yuval-Davis 1997
SAGE Books
Page 9 of 18
SAGE Books - Theorizing Gender and Nation
Pateman (1988). These theories divide the sphere of civil society into the public and private domains. Women
(and the family) are located in the private domain, which is not seen as politically relevant. As nationalism and
nations have usually been discussed as part of the public political sphere, the exclusion of women from that
arena has affected their exclusion from that discourse as well.
A welcome exception in this respect has been the work of George L. Mosse (1985; see also the discussion in
the introduction to Parker et al., 1992). He linked the rise of bourgeois family morality to the rise of nationalism
in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. In a sense Mosse follows the anthropological tradition of LéviStrauss
(1969) which has been more aware of the central links between gender relations and social cohesion.
Lévi-Strauss has seen the exchange of women as the original mechanism for creating social solidarity among
men of different kinship units and thus as the basis of constructing larger collectivities. It is not the exchange
of women but the control of them (or their subordination, to use Pateman's terminology) which is so often
at the base of the social order (Yuval-Davis, 1980). Nevertheless it would have been greatly beneficial for
political theory to have been more open to anthropological literature rather than continuing to count, even
unintentionally, on ‘man's pre-contractual natural state’ that has never been more than a convenient fiction.
It would have also helped to locate the phenomenon of nationalism beyond narrow westocentric boundaries
(Yuval-Davis, 1991b).
One of the main issues debated about the state is the extent to which it should be seen as independent of
society. Positions have varied from crude Marxist approaches which have seen the state as purely reflecting
the interests of the ‘ruling class', to approaches which have seen it as an independent institution which
mediates between contending pluralist interest groups à la Dahl's Polyarchy (1971). The division between
these two approaches is not as extreme as one might think, however, because even Lenin (1977) saw the
rise of the modern state as a ‘product and manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms’ which
has acquired a relative autonomy. He quotes Engels expressing the Marxist view on the nature of the state
as
a power, seemingly standing above society, that would alleviate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of
order; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from
it, is the state. (1977: 10)
Although Lenin warns against concluding from the above that the state can become the organ for the
reconciliation of the differing classes, this kind of explanation has been most often used in relation to the rise
of the welfare state (Marshall, 1950).
Another debate is the extent to which the state should be seen as a purely coercive instrument which imposes
law and order in a variety of ways (via legal, constitutional and executive powers), or as incorporating a variety
of other institutions, such as education and the media as well as economy and welfare (Althusser, 1971;
Balibar, 1990a). Directly related to this, however, is the question to what extent we can see the state as a
homogeneous and coherent ‘being’ as opposed to one in which different parts operate in different directions
and with different ideological orientations which might even sometimes conflict. The coexistence of anti-racist
legislation and racist immigration laws are a case in point.
With the rising hegemony of Foucauldian and postmodernist paradigms, the above point has led many to
reject the idea of a unitary state altogether, and instead to focus on social policies, the law, institutional
arrangements and discourses as heterogeneous elements which are not reducible to the state. Foucault's
(1980b) perspective has been that horizontal power grids exist on all levels in society and come into action
when resisted.
However, theoretical perspectives which have altogether dispensed with the state as a meaningful analytical
category cannot explain the centrality of struggles in civil society to gain further access to the state and state
power, or the extent to which the different positionings of men and women, kinship units and various ethnic
collectivities (as well as of other groupings in civil society) is determined by their differential access to the
state. Analytically, as well as politically, therefore, the state has to be differentiated from civil society. However,
the state is not unitary in its practices, its projects or its effects. As Floya Anthias and myself have expanded
elsewhere, the state can be defined as:
SAGE
© Nira Yuval-Davis 1997
SAGE Books
Page 10 of 18
SAGE Books - Theorizing Gender and Nation
a body of institutions which are centrally organized around the intentionality of control with a given apparatus
of enforcement (juridical and repressive) at its command and basis … Different forms of the state will involve
different relationships between the control/coercion twin which is the residing characteristic of the state.
(Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1989: 5)
Different social institutions, primarily those of schooling and the media, can be used for ideological production
in the modern liberal democratic state. However, they are not inherently part of the state as such, and often
are not even owned by it.
As will be argued in Chapter 4, there has been a conflation between the dichotomy of state and civil society
and that of public and private domains. In order to avoid a westocentric reading of states and societies, there
is a need to differentiate between state institutions, as mentioned above, civil society institutions, and the
domain of family and kinship relations. Civil society includes those institutions, collectivities, groupings and
social agencies which lie outside the formal rubric of state parameters outlined but which both inform and are
informed by them. This may include voluntary associations and institutions controlling the production of signs
and symbols as well as the economic market (Cohen, 1982; Keane, 1988; Melucci, 1989). The domain of the
family includes social, economic and political networks and households which are organized around kinship
or friendship relations.
All three domains (the state, civil society and the familial domain) produce their own ideological contents and
in different states would have differential access to economic and political resources. Ideology does not reside
(in a privileged sense), therefore, in any of these spheres. None of these spheres is ever homogeneous, and
different parts of the state can act in contradictory ways to others — and their effects on different ethnic,
class, gender and other groupings in the society could be different. Different states (and the same state in
different historical circumstances) also differ in the extent to which their powers of control are concentrated in
the central state government or in local state governments. Furthermore, they differ in their tolerance towards
different political projects which are in conflict with those that are hegemonic within central government. These
questions of the correspondence, in political projects, of the different components and levels of the state,
involve also the questions of what are the mechanisms by which these projects are being reproduced and/or
changed; of how state control can be delegated from one level to another; and, probably most importantly, of
how sections and groupings from the domains of civil society and the family gain access to the state's coercive
and controlling powers. It is within this context that the relationship between ‘nations’ and ‘states', as well as
between other forms of ethnic groupings and the state, has to be analysed — a precondition to understanding
the ways women affect and are affected by these processes. We shall turn, therefore, to examine the notion
of the ‘nation’ as an ideological and political construct separate from that of the ‘nation-state'.
The Notion of Nations
There is a rumour (I never actually managed to find the exact reference) that Enoch Powell, the first
theoretician of the British ‘new right', once defined ‘the nation’ as ‘two males plus defending a territory with the
women and children'. This definition is based on a naturalized image of the nation (or actually an ethologist
image clearly based on the behaviour of a pack of wolves) which other ‘primordialist’ theoreticians of the
nation also share (for example, Van den Berghe, 1979). According to these theories, nations not only are
eternal and universal but also constitute a natural extension of family and kinship relations. The family and
kinship units in these constructions are based on natural sexual divisions of labour, in which the men protect
the womenandchildren'(to use Cynthia Enloe's 1990 term).
Against this naturalized image, Ben Anderson (1983) has presented his, by now classic, construction of ‘the
nation’ as an ‘imagined community'. According to Anderson and other ‘modernists’ (for example, Gellner,
1983; Hobsbawm, 1990), nations are not an eternal and universal phenomenon but specifically modern and a
direct result of particular developments in European history. Nations could arise, according to Anderson, only
when technological innovations established ‘print capitalism', when reading spread from the elites into other
classes and people started to read mass publications in their own languages rather than in classical religious
languages, thus establishing linguistic national ‘imagined communities'. However, Anderson emphasizes the
importance of the fact that people feel that their membership in the nation is ‘natural’ and not chosen:
‘Precisely because such ties are not chosen, they have about them a halo of disinterestedness’ (1991: 143).
SAGE
© Nira Yuval-Davis 1997
SAGE Books
Page 11 of 18
SAGE Books - Theorizing Gender and Nation
For that reason, claims Anderson, the nation, like the family, can ask for sacrifices — including the ultimate
sacrifice of killing and being killed. Kitching (1985) has pointed out that Anderson's approach to nationalism
begins to explain the passions (to differentiate from just interests) which are involved in the attachment of
people to their nations.4
Gellner (1983) explains the nationalist passions somewhat differently. He traces the development of
nationalism to the need of modern societies for cultural homogeneity in order to function smoothly. This
need, when satisfied, is sponsored by the modern nation-state; but when it is unfulfilled, it stimulates the
growth of ideological movements among the excluded groupings (those who have not been absorbed into the
hegemonic culture), which call for the establishment of alternative nation-states.
Another influential approach to the study of nations is that of Anthony Smith (1986) who looks at the ‘ethnic
origins of nations'. While agreeing with the ‘modernists’ that nationalism, both as an ideology and as a
movement, is a wholly modern phenomenon, Smith argues that
the ‘modern nation’ in practice incorporates several features of pre-modern ethne and owes much to a general
model of ethnicity which has survived in many areas until the dawn of the ‘modern era. (1986: 18)
Smith claims that the specificity of ethnic collectivities is to be found in its ‘myth-symbol complex’ which is
very durable over time (although the specific meaning of the myths and symbols can change), rather than in
any other social, economic or political features of the collectivity. He warns against oversimplistic notions of
imagined communities and ‘invented traditions’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983; Smith, 1995).
Sami Zubaida (1989), in criticizing this approach, has anchored the durability of ethnicities in certain socioeconomic
and political processes. He claims (by using examples from the histories of both Europe and
the Middle East) that ethnic homogeneity is not a cause but rather a result of a long history of centralized
governments which created a ‘national unity’ in the premodern era. It ‘was not given - but was achieved
precisely by the political processes which facilitated centralization’ (1989: 13).
Whether it is the state which homogenizes ethnicity or whether it is other socio-economic and political
processes (Balibar, 1990a), it is important to recognize, as both Smith and Zubaida have done, that there is
an inherent connection between the ethnic and national projects. While it is important to look at the historical
specificity of the construction of collectivities, there is no inherent difference (although sometimes there is
a difference in scale) between ethnic and national collectivities: they are both the Andersonian ‘imagined
communities'.
What is specific to the nationalist project and discourse is the claim for a separate political representation
for the collective. This often — but not always — takes the form of a claim for a separate state and/or
territory, although some states are based on bi- or multi-national principles (like Belgium or Lebanon) and
some supra-state political projects like the European Union can, at specific historical moments, develop state
characteristics. Nationalist demands can also be aimed at establishing a regional autonomy rather than a
separate state, as in the case of Scotland or Catalonia; or they can be irredentist, advocating joining a
neighbouring state rather than establishing one of their own, such as the republican movement in Northern
Ireland or the Kashmiri movement for unification with Pakistan. Although state and territory have been closely
bound together, there have been cases of nationalist movements which called for the state to be established
in a different territory than that where they were active. Both the Jewish Zionist movement (which established
the state of Israel) and the black Zionist movement (which established Liberia) called for the mass emigration
of their members from the countries where they lived. Others have not articulated any specific territorial
boundaries for their national independence. It is the demand for political sovereignty which separates the
‘Black Nation’ from other ‘black community activists', or those who call for the ‘Khalipha', the global nation of
Islam, from other committed Muslims. The Austrian Marxist Otto Bauer (1940; see Nimni, 1991; Yuval-Davis,
1987a) called for the separation of nationalism and the state as the only viable solution to the hopeless mix
of collectivities in the territories which constituted the Austro-Hungarian empire, and a very similar situation is
emerging today with the fall of the Soviet empire and in many other places in the post-colonial world (such as
Rwanda).
SAGE
© Nira Yuval-Davis 1997
SAGE Books
Page 12 of 18
SAGE Books - Theorizing Gender and Nation
The separation of nationality and the state also exists, however, in many other cases. In many parts of
the world there exist immigrant communities which are culturally and politically committed to continue to
‘belong’ to their ‘mother country’ — or more specifically to the national collectivity from where they, their
parents or their forebears have come. The rise of these ‘committed diasporas’ has been co-determined
by several factors. Firstly, technological advances both in means of international travel and in media and
communications, have made the preservation of links with the ‘homeland’ much easier, as they have enabled
intergenerational cultural and linguistic reproduction. ‘Ethnic videos', for example, constitute one of the largest
video markets and have been consumed by people who have little or no access to the mass media of the
countries where they live. And cable systems or satellite dishes have given many people direct access to
their own national and ethnic media, as well as establishing new diffuse ethnic collectivities (such as the
international South Asian community). Deutch (1966) and Schlesinger (1987) have pointed out that
Membership in a people consists in wide complementarity of social communication. It consists in the ability
to communicate more effectively, and over a wider range of subjects, with members of one large group than
with outsiders. (Deutch, 1966: 97)
It is now easier than ever for diasporic communities to keep communicating within the boundaries of their
collectivities and thus to reproduce them.
At the same time, as a result of certain successes of the anti-racist and civil rights movements, there has
been a certain shift in national ideologies in many western countries and multiculturalism has become a
hegemonic ideology which, with all its problematics (see discussion in Chapter 3), has eased somewhat
the pressures on immigrants to assimilate. This was aided by the fact that in the post-colonial world there
are many ongoing nationalist struggles where different collectivities compete not just for access to their
states’ powers and resources, but also on the constitutive nature of these states. One cannot imagine the
continued nationalist struggles of the Irish Republican Army, for instance, without the financial, political and
other help of the diaspora Irish communities, especially in the USA. In the case of the Jewish diaspora —
the oldest ‘established’ diaspora — the hegemony of zionism has meant that many have transformed Israel
into an ex post facto ‘homeland’ even if they have never been there, let alone lived there, and international
Jewish support has played a crucial role in the establishment and development of Israel (Yuval-Davis, 1987b).
As Anderson (1995) commented, not enough recognition is given to the role of diaspora communities in
contemporary nationalist struggles.
One has to distinguish, however, between ‘diaspora communities’ (Brah, 1996; Lavie and Swedenburg,
1996; Lemelle and Kelly, 1994) and political exiles. The latter are usually individuals or families who have
been part of political struggles in the homeland; their identity and collectivity membership continue to be
directed singularly, or at least primarily, towards there, and they aim to ‘go back’ the moment the political
situation changes. For diaspora communities, on the other hand, participation in the national struggles in the
homeland, including sending ammunition to Ireland or ‘gold bricks’ to build the Hindu temple in place of the
Muslim mosque in Ayodhya which was burned in December 1992, can be done primarily within an ethnic
rather than a nationalist discourse, as an act of affirmation of their collectivity membership. Their destiny is
primarily bound up with the country where they live and where their children grow up, rather than with their
country of origin — although as hybrids they at the same time belong to and are outside of both national
collectivities. Their ambivalences are sharper, however, the more racialized is their ethnic collectivity in their
country of immigration.
Bhabha (1990) has talked about the specific role people on the national margins like hybrids have in the
continuous reconstruction of nations by producing their counter-narratives. Nora Rätzel (1994) has found that
immigrants tend to imagine Heimat (home) as a much less physical place than do the ‘natives’ and more
as the place where they feel comfortable and where their nearest and dearest live as well. Attachments of
political exiles to their homelands, on the other hand, often concentrate on the climate, the smells and other
physical characteristics of the country, and there are much more ambivalent feelings towards the people, let
alone the state.
If ‘nations’ are not to be identified with ‘nation-states', one must ask if there are any ‘objective’ characteristics
according to which nations can be recognized. This question is not purely theoretical, given the wide
SAGE
© Nira Yuval-Davis 1997
SAGE Books
Page 13 of 18
SAGE Books - Theorizing Gender and Nation
consensus. affirmed by the United Nations, regarding ‘the right of nations to self-determination'.
There have been many definitions of ‘the nation'. Some of them sound like a shopping list, as, for example,
this influential ‘formula definition’ of ‘the nation’ by Stalin, which he developed as ‘the expert on the national
question’ among the Bolsheviks before the October Revolution. According to Stalin,
A nation is a historically evolved, stable community of language, territory, economic life and psychological
make-up manifested in a community of culture. (1972: 13)
Other definitions dispense with this shopping list altogether. Greenfeld, for example, argues persuasively that
common territory or common language, statehood or shared traditions, history or race — none of these
relationships has proved inevitable … National identity … is an identity which derives from membership in
a ‘people', the fundamental characteristic of which is that it is defined as a ‘nation'. Every member of the
‘nation’ thus interpreted partakes in its superior, elite, quality, and it is in consequence that a stratified national
population is perceived as essentially homogeneous, and the lines of status and class are superficial. This
principle lies at the basis of all nationalisms … Apart from it, different nationalisms share little. (1992: 7)
Greenfeld sees a historical affinity between the notion of natio and that of ethne, which originally, in both Latin
and Greek respectively, meant ‘a group of foreigners'. However, following the transformation of the idea of the
nation in European history she argues forcefully that ‘nationalism is not necessarily a form of particularism’
and that ‘a nation coextensive with humanity is in no way a contradiction in terms’ (1992: 7). This perspective
differs sharply from that of Anthony Smith who insists on the ‘ethnic origin of nations’ (1986) and their intrinsic
particularisms:
Its [nationalism's] success depends on specific cultural and historical contexts, and this means that the
nations it helps to create are in turn derived from pre-existing and highly particularized cultural heritages and
ethnic formulations. (1995: viii)
The ingredient missing from all of these definitions, however, is the element emphasized by Otto Bauer (1940;
Yuval-Davis, 1987a) — that of ‘common destiny', which is of crucial importance for the construction of nations.
It is oriented towards the future, rather than just the past, and can explain more than individual and communal
assimilations within particular nations. On the one hand, it can explain a subjective sense of commitment of
people to collectivities and nations, such as in settler societies or in post-colonial states, in which there is
no shared myth of common origin (Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis, 1995). At the same time it can also explain
the dynamic nature of any national collectivity and the perpetual processes of reconstruction of boundaries
which take place within them, via immigration, naturalization, conversion and other similar social and political
processes.
'The United States of the World’ which Greenfeld sees as a possible nation would have to gain this sense
of shared destiny which would differ from other (intergalactic?) collective destinies before it could evolve into
a national collectivity, as collectivities are organized around boundaries which divide the world into ‘us’ and
‘them'.
The Multi-Dimensionality of Nationalist Projects
There have been many attempts to classify the different kinds of nationalist movements and nationalist
ideologies which have arisen in the world during the last 200 years (for example, Smith, 1971: Chapter 8;
Snyder, 1968: Chapter 4). Some classifications have tried to maintain scientific Neutralism', and developed
either historical taxonomies (which focus virtually exclusively on Europe) or sociological taxonomies (which
focus on the various social locations and specific goals of the national movements, aimed at secession, pannational
liberation and so on). An influential classification has been developed by Anthony Smith (1971; 1986)
based on the specific character of the nationalist project, including both the ‘ethnic-genealogical’ movement
and the ‘civic-territorial’ movement. In this he is continuing a German tradition which tends to differentiate
between nation-states and state-nations, on to use the German terminology Kulturnation and Staatnation (see
Neuberger, 1986; Stolcke, 1987).
SAGE
© Nira Yuval-Davis 1997
SAGE Books
Page 14 of 18
SAGE Books - Theorizing Gender and Nation
Recent books on nationalism by Michael Ignatieff (1993) and Julia Kristeva (1993) basically maintain this
dichotomous classification, but give it a much more explicit moralistic tone of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ nationalism
than Smith. Ignatieff promotes ‘civic nationalism’ as one which enables individuals to ‘reconcile their rights
to shape their own lives with the need to belong to a community’ (1993: 4). He sees the promotion of ‘civic
nationalism’ as a way to reduce pressures for the rise of ‘ethnic nationalism’ which is exclusive, authoritarian
and consumed by racial hatred. Such pressures usually increase in crisis and transition times such as after
the collapse of the Soviet empire.
Similarly, Kristeva sees ethnic nationalism and the cult of origins as a hate reaction triggered by deep crises
of national identity. For her, democratic nationalism is good not in itself, but as the best available option,
given the reality of the modern world where people without a nationality are usually deprived of citizenship
and rights. Robert Fine (1994) has made a critique of these approaches and of Habermas (1992) which he
also includes in the ‘new nationalism’ paradigm. (Fine argues that Habermas’ concept of ‘post-nationalist’
patriotism is, ultimately, not that different from the ‘new nationalism’ of Ignatieff and Kristeva.) He points
out (using some of the insights of Hannah Arendt, 1975, who discussed political shifts in Europe during
the inter-war years) that there can be no simplistic mutually exclusive separation between these two types
of nationalism. Hannah Arendt has argued that the antinomies of the modern democratic nation-state exist
already in its constitution, as representative governments are themselves built upon the exclusion from
political life of the majority of citizens. As will be discussed further in Chapter 4, citizenship itself has been
exclusionary and therefore cannot be the polar negation of ethnic exclusion. As Fine puts it: ‘It [the ‘new
nationalism'] presents itself as the antidote to ethnic consciousness, but there is no sphere nor moment of
innocence within modern political life’ (1994: 441).
The realization that a theory of nationalism must embrace both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ nationalisms and that there
can be no easy separation of specific nationalist movements into one or the other is what brought Thomas
Nairn (1977) to call nationalism ‘the modern Janus'. Janus, the Roman god who stood at the gates of people's
homes, had two faces: he looked backwards and forwards at the same time.
Moreover, nationalist projects are usually multiplex, although often one version is much more hegemonic
than others at different historical moments. Different members of the collectivity tend to promote contesting
constructions which tend to be more or less exclusionary, more or less linked to other ideologies such as
socialism and/or religion. Attempts to classify all different states and societies according to these different
types of nationalist projects would constitute an ahistorical, impossible and misleading mission, as are all such
classifications of social phenomena. Rather, we need to treat these ‘types’ as different major dimensions of
nationalist ideologies and projects which are combined in different ways in specific historical cases.
Rather than using the dichotomous classifications put forward by the above writers, I would like to differentiate
between three major dimensions of nationalist projects (Yuval-Davis, 1993). In my view it is very important
not to conflate concerns emanating from constructions of nations based on notions of origin and those
based on culture. Both of them need also to be analytically distinguished from constructions of nations
based on citizenship of states. Different aspects of gender relations play an important role in each of these
dimensions of nationalist projects and are crucial for any valid the-orization of them, as will be elaborated
throughout the book. One major dimension of nationalist projects to be related to gender relations in the book
is the genealogical dimension which is constructed around the specific origin of the people (or their race)
(Volknation). The myth of common origin or shared blood/genes tends to construct the most exclusionary/
homogeneous visions of ‘the nation’ (see Chapter 2). Another major dimension of nationalist projects is the
cultural dimension in which the symbolic heritage provided by language and/or religion and/or other customs
and traditions is constructed as the ‘essence’ of ‘the nation’ (Kulturnation). Although such a construction
allows for assimilation, it tends to have little tolerance of ‘non-organic’ diversity (see Chapter 3). The civic
dimension of nationalist projects focuses on citizenship (Staatnation) (see Chapter 4) as determining the
boundaries of the nation, and thus relates it directly to notions of state sovereignty and specific territoriality.
Nationed Gender and Gendered Nations
In the previous sections of the chapter we looked at issues concerning gender and nation as they have
been theorized and debated as separate social phenomena. The aim of this book, however, as mentioned
SAGE
© Nira Yuval-Davis 1997
SAGE Books
Page 15 of 18
SAGE Books - Theorizing Gender and Nation
above, is to show that a proper understanding of either cannot afford to ignore the ways they are informed
and constructed by each other. In this last section of the introductory chapter, I would like to point out some
of these intersections as they construct both individuals’ subjectivities and social lives, and the social and
political projects of nations and states. Each of these intersections will be further developed in the following
chapters of the book.
Women and the Biological Reproduction of the Nation
The struggle of women for reproductive rights has been at the heart of feminist struggles since the inception
of the movement. The right of women to choose whether to have children, as well as how many to have and
when, has been seen by many feminists as the basic ‘touchstone’ of feminist politics.
Most of the discussions on women's reproductive rights, however, until the last decade at least, have been
concentrated on the effects of the existence or absence of these rights on women as individuals. There were
discussions, for instance, on how these rights affect women's health; how they affect their working lives and
opportunities for upward mobility; and how they affect their family life.
However, often the pressures on women to have or not to have children relate to them not as individuals,
workers and/or wives, but as members of specific national collectivities. According to different national
projects, under specific historical circumstances, some or all women of childbearing age groups would be
called on, sometimes bribed, and sometimes even forced, to have more, or fewer, children. The three main
discourses discussed in Chapter 2 which are applied in these cases are: the ‘people as power’ discourse,
which sees maintaining and enlarging the population of the national collectivity as vital for the national
interest; the Malthusian discourse, which, in contrast to the first discourse, sees the reduction of the number of
children as the way to prevent future national disaster; and the eugenicist discourse, which aims at improving
the ‘quality of the national stock’ by encouraging those who are ‘suitable’ in terms of origin and class to have
more children and discouraging the others from doing so.
These policies, as the heated debates before and during the 1994 UN Cairo Conference on Population
and Development Policies demonstrated, are at the heart of most contemporary politics, both in the North
and in the South. Any discussions of women's reproductive rights which do not take into account this
national dimension can be held to be seriously wanting. At the same time, any discussion of national (and
international) policies concerning development, the economy, welfare, etc., would be wanting if the gendered
character of their population policies were not taken into account.
A central dimension of these policies would usually be, to a greater or lesser extent, a concern about the
‘genetic pool’ of the nation. Nationalist projects which focus on genealogy and origin as the major organizing
principles of the national collectivity would tend to be more exclusionary than other nationalist projects. Only
by being born into a certain collectivity could one be a full member in it. Control of marriage, procreation and
therefore sexuality would thus tend to be high on the nationalist agenda. When constructions of ‘race’ are
added to the notion of the common genetic pool, fear of miscegenation becomes central to the nationalist
discourse. In its extremity this includes the ‘one-drop rule’ (Davis, 1993) which dictates that even if ‘one drop
of blood’ of members of the ‘inferior race’ is present, it could ‘contaminate’ and ‘pollute’ that of the ‘superior
race'.
Cultural Reproduction and Gender Relations
The notion of ‘genetic pools', however, is but one mode of imagining nations. People's ‘culture and tradition',
which is usually partly composed of a specific version of a specific religion and/or a specific language,
is another essentializing dimension, which in different national projects acquires a significance higher or
lower than that of genealogy and blood. The mythical unity of national ‘imagined communities’ which divides
the world between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is maintained and ideologically reproduced by a whole system of what
Armstrong (1982) calls symbolic ‘border guards'. These ‘border guards’ can identify people as members or
non-members of a specific collectivity. They are closely linked to specific cultural codes of style of dress and
behaviour as well as to more elaborate bodies of customs, religion, literary and artistic modes of production,
SAGE
© Nira Yuval-Davis 1997
SAGE Books
Page 16 of 18
SAGE Books - Theorizing Gender and Nation
and, of course, language.
Gender symbols play a particularly significant role in this, and thus constructions of manhood and
womanhood, as well as sexuality and gendered relations of power, need to be explored in relation to these
processes. Chapter 3 discusses women's roles as symbolic border guards and as embodiments of the
collectivity, while at the same time being its cultural reproducers. This dimension of women's lives is crucial
to understanding their subjectivities as well as their relations with each other, with children and with men. At
the same time, discourse and struggles around the issues of ‘women's emancipation’ or ‘women following
tradition’ (as have been expressed in various campaigns for and against women's veiling, voting, education
and employment) have been at the centre of most modernist and anti-modernist nationalist struggles.
In order to understand this centrality of gender relations to nationalist projects, one needs to analyse culture
as a dynamic contested resource which can be used differently in different projects and by people who are
differentially positioned in the collectivity. Chapter 3 explores issues pertaining to projects of multiculturalism
on the one hand and cultural and religious fundamentalism on the other hand within contemporary
globalization processes. It also discusses the particular effects these have on gender relations and on notions
of cultural identities and social difference.
Citizenship and Difference
As mentioned in the previous section of this chapter, a third major dimension of nationalist projects, in addition
to Volknation and Kulturnation, is that of Staatnation, or state-related citizenship. In Chapter 4 the book
explores issues relating to gender relations, citizenship and difference. In some ways, state citizenship as a
criterion for membership in the national collectivity is the most inclusive mode of joining a collectivity, because
in principle anybody — of whatever origin or culture - might be able to join. In practice this inclusiveness
is usually dependent not only on the socio-economic resources of those who are applying, but on a myriad
of rules and regulations concerning immigration and naturalization, which generally ensure easier access
for some categories of people than for others. Women have tended to be differentially regulated to men in
nationality, immigration and refugee legislation, often being constructed as dependent on their family men
and expected to follow them and live where they do. Although equal opportunity legislation in the west has
weakened this sharp differentiation over the last fifteen years, it is by no means obliterated (Bhabha and
Shutter, 1994).
However, citizenship in this book is treated in a much wider sense than just the formal right to carry a passport
or even to reside in a specific country. It follows T.H. Marshall's definition (1950; 1975; 1981) of citizenship as
‘full membership in the community’ which encompasses civil, political, and social rights and responsibilities.
Thus citizenship is perceived to be multi-layered and often diverse, relating to local, ethnic, state and often
trans-state communities. Women's citizenship in these communities is usually of a dual nature: on the one
hand they are included in the general body of citizens; on the other hand there are always rules, regulations
and policies which are specific to them.
Of course, gender is not the only factor which affects people's citizenship. Ethnicity, class, sexuality, ability,
place of residence and so on, affect it as well. The extent to which citizenship should be seen as an individual
or a collective attribute, and how this affects constructions and distributions of citizenship rights, are issues
which are explored in Chapter 4.
The chapter also examines the classical location of women in the private domain and that of men in the public
domain and how this has affected constructions of citizenship. Similarly it explores the notions of passive and
active citizenship which, like the private/public dichotomy, have been a base for a comparative typology of
citizenship (Turner. 1990).
Gendered Militaries, Gendered Wars
Active citizenship involves not only rights but also duties and responsibilities. The ultimate citizenship
responsibility used to be that of being prepared to die for one's country. Chapter 5 examines the constructions
SAGE
© Nira Yuval-Davis 1997
SAGE Books
Page 17 of 18
SAGE Books - Theorizing Gender and Nation
of manhood and womanhood which have been linked to participation in militaries and in wars, and how those
have been linked to citizenship rights and other social divisions such as ethnicity and class. The chapter
examines the effects of modern technology and the professionalization of militaries on the participation of
women in the military and their constructions as soldiers. It also looks at the effects these might have on
nationalist ideologies which mobilize men to fight for the sake of ‘womenandchildren’ (Enloe, 1990).
The chapter moves then to examine the gendered character of wars and the sexual divisions which take place
not only among the fighters but also among the war victims — the murdered, the raped, the interned and
the refugees. The symbolic character of systematic rapes in war is discussed within this context. The chapter
ends with a discussion of the relationship between ‘womanhood', feminism and ‘peace'.
Women, Ethnicity and Empowerment: Towards Transversal Politics
The final chapter of the book (Chapter 6) looks at questions of gender, nation, and the politics of women's
empowerment. Within this frame, the chapter examines women's co-operation with and resistance to
nationalist struggles on the one hand and international feminist politics on the other. As a way of dealing
with some of the difficult issues involved, the chapter starts to develop a model of transversal politics, a
mode of coalition politics in which the differential positionings of the individuals and collectives involved will
be recognized, as well as the value systems which underlie their struggles. As such, the transversal politics
model adheres to Elizabeth Spelmans warning:
The notion of the generic ‘woman’ functions in feminist thought much the way the notion of generic ‘man’
[or ‘person'] has functioned in Western philosophy: it obscures the heterogeneity of women and cuts off
examination of the significance of such heterogeneity for feminist theory and political activity. (1988: ix)
Notes
1 Msg. Karaman, in Narod (Zagreb, Croatia), no. 10, 9 September 1995, p. 14, quoted in Meznaric(1995: 12).
2 Address of the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress (1987: 8). quoted in Gaitskell
and Unterhalter (1989: 71).
3 I am using in the book the term ‘westocentric’ rather than ‘Eurocentric’ because I want to highlight the fact
that ‘the western front’ expands far beyond Europe.
4 Going over the text of this chapter during the collective madness of Euro ‘96, one cannot but relate this
passion to the playing field and the ‘tribal identities’ of competitive sport (see Mangan, 1996).
• nationalism
• patriarchy
• feminism
• civil society
• citizenship
• nation
• women
http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446222201.n1
SAGE
© Nira Yuval-Davis 1997
SAGE Books
Page 18 of 18
SAGE Books - Theorizing Gender and Nation